Gifted education in the early 1990s felt important, urgent, and slightly covert. Now I’m 40 with a family, four academic degrees, a growing career, and crippling anxiety.
I was born in 1984, which means I came of age during the retooling of gifted education; quietly fueled by residual Cold War urgency and national policy alarms like A Nation at Risk. In the early 1990s, federal attention and funding for gifted education were resurging, thanks to calls for academic excellence and global competitiveness. The passing of the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act in 1988 had brought both research and grant funding to the field.
Being in the gifted program felt like recruitment. We were pulled from class for logic puzzles, abstract reasoning exercises, and timed challenges that seemed designed less for enrichment and more like preparation to crack codes or outwit a Soviet operative. The faster you could solve a math problem, finish a book, or master a Rubik’s cube, the more gifted you were believed to be.
The message was clear: You are one of the smart ones, and we had to live up to that label. We were praised for being exceptional and quietly warned never to let that image slip. Help was for the others. Mistakes meant our talent had limits. And rest? That was just lost momentum — time we could have spent living up to our potential.
Gifted kids grow up
That mindset didn’t fade with age. It calcified. Entire corners of the internet are filled with inside jokes about gifted kids of the ’90s who grew up to become high-functioning adults with spreadsheet color codes and ambient panic. The memes and TikTok videos are funny because they’re true. We were praised for being ahead of the curve, but no one ever taught us how to step off the tracks. Pauses felt like failure. Asking for help felt like exposure.
I thought I was being trained to decode enemy ciphers. I was actually being trained to answer emails at midnight without blinking.
So now, decades later, we’re in leadership roles across schools, nonprofits, and companies — not because we crave control — but because we’re chasing some invisible standard of excellence. The anxiety isn’t about being busy. It’s about the nagging sense that we haven’t done enough, haven’t become enough, haven’t proven enough. We’re haunted less by failure than by the idea of wasted potential. That’s the real engine: not self-doubt, but an endless internal whisper. You could be doing more.
I thought I was being trained to decode enemy ciphers. I was actually being trained to answer emails at midnight without blinking. I’m tired of being asked what’s next. I’m already carrying too much weight.
And yet, something is shifting. Gen Z has arrived.
The Gen Z professional
This new generation of professionals isn’t chasing potential in the same way. They’re not trying to earn their value through output or prove their worth by being constantly available. They care about impact, but they’re not afraid to define it differently. They say “no” without guilt, log off without spiraling, and don’t treat rest like a reward for performance. They treat it like part of the plan.
Some leaders read this as entitlement. But maybe it’s just confidence that they don’t have to exhaust themselves to have value.
It’s tempting to mistake their approach for softness or laziness. After all, many of us built careers on urgency — on being reachable, responsive, and relentless. But when I watch Gen Z work, I see something we were never taught: sustainability. They’re not allergic to hard work. They’re just unwilling to self-destruct to prove their worth.
When I first started working with Gen Z colleagues, I felt my old reflexes kick in: Must be nice. But underneath that reflex was something harder to admit: I envied them.
My anxiety didn’t just live in my calendar. It showed up in my leadership. I expected from others what I demanded of myself: constant motion, constant growth. Somewhere between a “growth mindset” and No Child Left Behind, we stopped asking how people were doing and started asking how fast they could improve. What began as a philosophy of possibility turned into a mandate for constant forward movement. If things felt calm, I got nervous. Calm meant complacent. And complacency was the enemy of potential — something I’d been taught to fear since the third grade.
But over time, something shifted inside me. Not all at once, and not without resistance. But slowly, I began to wonder if growth could mean something other than acceleration. Maybe the point shouldn’t be to squeeze more out of every minute, but to live in a way that makes the work worth sustaining.
Gen Z hasn’t abandoned ambition. They just redefined it. They still care about excellence, but not at the cost of their identity. They still believe in potential, but not as a debt to repay with their mental health. Watching them broke something open in me. It gave me permission to imagine leadership that didn’t depend on urgency to prove its value.
A new perspective
I used to believe that urgency was proof of commitment. If I wasn’t working harder than everyone else, I wasn’t doing enough. But slowly, and with more resistance than I’d like to admit, I’ve started to lead differently.
Now, I pause before sending a late-night email. I ask my team how they’re feeling before asking what they’re fixing. I don’t flinch when a staff member says, “That’s too much for right now,” because I’ve started saying it myself. This isn’t about easing up. It’s about creating conditions where excellence doesn’t require erosion.
We preach work-life balance but praise the first one in and the last one out. I’m not going to do that anymore.
Being gifted in the 1990s taught me to excel. Growing up taught me to endure. But leading today requires something else. It requires the wisdom to know when to push, when to rest, and when to model the balance we never saw ourselves.
Schools are full of adults like me, overachievers who never quite feel like they’ve arrived. We were trained to seek growth at all costs. But if we aren’t careful, we end up replicating the very systems that exhausted us. We write mission statements that promise sustainability while rewarding urgency. We preach work-life balance but praise the first one in and the last one out. I’m not going to do that anymore.
Gen Z didn’t make me less ambitious. They made me more honest. Watching them protect their energy, articulate their needs, and reject the cult of constant motion reminded me that achievement without well-being isn’t success. It’s survival.
I wonder what it would mean for our benchmarks for education progress to evolve, too. We track student achievement, educator effectiveness, and school improvement with relentless precision. But what if we also measured sustainability? What if future reports didn’t just name risks, but named recoveries — schools that are learning to grow without burning out?
Maybe it’s time we stop asking who’s ahead and start asking who’s still whole.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Kappan, Vol. 107, No. 3-4.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Meagan Booth
Meagan Booth is supervisor of employee relations at Knox County Schools, Knoxville, Tennessee.
